Run into this problem whenever my miners run out of coal to mine.
The coal is piped to the power generation system, which burns it to produce power.
This means that the system suffers a loss of power and I have to scrounge up some coal to get it back on line from another system.
This can mean that my furnaces, which have coal automatically inserted into them, have less fuel.
The butterfly effect of this could shut down your entire factory.
I suggest that you have multiple backups, battery banks, solar, to keep the factory running when this inevitably happens.
Or you could just go nuclear, that's another option.

From early to mid-game (after 1 h into the game, so not very early):
I run the coal miners and the inserters in the power array on a seperate power grid. Just a few steam engines or solar panels solumely for the purpose to keep the the power production going even if the consumption is higher than the production.

Personally I like to build my power plant beside it's own patch of coal, with it's own dedicated miners. Then I add a box and an inserter that takes coal from the coal belt, so I have a nearby stash of coal to restart things in the event of a loss of power. I also arrange my power lines so that somewhere near that box of coal is a critical power pole that connects the boilers + steam engines + coal mining to the rest of the base. So in the event of a power outage caused by insufficient coal reaching the boilers, I can just remove that pole (to instantly remove 98% of the load), and turn the inserter around (to get coal flowing quickly onto the belt). If needed I can grab some coal from the box, and manually add coal to the nearest boiler or two. Once things are stable I can add some more boilers + steam engines and/or mining drills and replace the removed power pole. That power pole also makes a decent place to add a switch to enable the steam engines as backup power if/when I move to solar.

SuicideJunkie wrote:Is there any clever way for a circuit network to detect biters?
The majority of my base's power usage is currently going to idle laser towers, and the spikes during an attack are surprisingly small.

I'd like to make peril-sensitive firebases that bring additional guns online when there is an imminent attack. Trying to measure the draw from a sentinel turret and bringing more guns online after the shooting has already started would not be responsive or very effective.

Rather than doing something complicated to detect when your laser turrets fire, what if you use an ammo turret as detection? It is pretty straightforward to detect when an inserter triggers, so as soon as an inserter tries to reload the turret you can turn on the lasers. Possible downside - it takes a little while for a gun turret to deplete a single clip, so this may be too slow depending on how nasty your biter attacks are.

SuicideJunkie wrote:Is there any clever way for a circuit network to detect biters?
The majority of my base's power usage is currently going to idle laser towers, and the spikes during an attack are surprisingly small.

I'd like to make peril-sensitive firebases that bring additional guns online when there is an imminent attack. Trying to measure the draw from a sentinel turret and bringing more guns online after the shooting has already started would not be responsive or very effective.

Rather than doing something complicated to detect when your laser turrets fire, what if you use an ammo turret as detection? It is pretty straightforward to detect when an inserter triggers, so as soon as an inserter tries to reload the turret you can turn on the lasers. Possible downside - it takes a little while for a gun turret to deplete a single clip, so this may be too slow depending on how nasty your biter attacks are.

Detecting when a laser turret fires would be much faster but by that point he thinks it wouldn't turn on the additional turrets fast enough to respond.

Junkie, you can use detection on a flamethrower turret. It doesn't require power (so no weird setups to give it power but not the lasers) and you can easily detect when it's firing by checking the fuel input. It has a longer range than laser turrets so your turrets will turn on before the biters are in range.

PlanetX wrote:My inserters fail to grab stuff, they move a bit when an item comes along but they don't actually grab the item. How do I solve this?

Most of the time the issue is that you don't have enough power. Hover over the inserter (or any power pole) and check if the Electricity bar on the right side is green/full. If it's not then make sure your power setup is working propwrly (e.g. all boilers have fuel), expand it if necessary.

You can also left-click power poles to open the Electric network info window for more details.

PlanetX wrote:My inserters fail to grab stuff, they move a bit when an item comes along but they don't actually grab the item. How do I solve this?

Most of the time the issue is that you don't have enough power. Hover over the inserter (or any power pole) and check if the Electricity bar on the right side is green/full. If it's not then make sure your power setup is working propwrly (e.g. all boilers have fuel), expand it if necessary.

You can also left-click power poles to open the Electric network info window for more details.